Materialism and the Task of Anthroposophy

Materialism/Anthroposophy: Lecture VII

LECTURE VIIDornach, April 22, 1921

A future study
of history will record these days as belonging among the most
significant ones of European history, for today central Europe's
renunciation of a will of its own became known.
[Note 1]
It remains to be seen
in what direction matters will develop further in the next
few days, but whatever takes place, it is, after all, an
action that much more so than many that have preceded it in
our catastrophic age, is connected with human decisions of
will that originated in the full sense of the word from the
forces of decline in European civilization. Such a day can
remind us of the periods from which emerged everything within
European civilization, the origin of which I described in the
past few weeks. It has its point of departure, as it were, in
what is described so superficially by history but what so
profoundly influenced the civilization of mankind after the
fourth Christian century.

We have
characterized these events from several perspectives. We have
outlined how after the fourth century the element that could
be termed the absolutely legalistic spirit invaded the
ecclesiastical and secular civilization of the Occident and
then became more and more intensified. We then indicated the
sources from which these matters originated. Indeed, already
earlier we have called attention to the fact that in the
middle of the nineteenth century modern humanity underwent a
crisis that, although given little notice, can even be
described from an anatomical, physiological standpoint, as we
saw here a few weeks ago.
[Note 2]
All that then took its course in the second half of the
nineteenth century, particularly in the last third,
culminating in the unfortunate first two decades of the
twentieth century, stands under the influence of what
occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century.

This day in
particular gives us cause to introduce these considerations
we intend to pursue in the next few days with the
contemplation of a certain personality. This is something we
have done already on several occasions, but it might be
especially important from the viewpoint I wish to assume
today. One could say that this is an individual who, partly
as a spectator and partly as one undergoing the events of
history as a tragic personality, experienced what was present
in the form of forces of decline within European civilization
in the last third of the nineteenth century. I am referring
to Friedrich Nietzsche.
[Note 3]

We are not
assuming our standpoint today in order to biographically
consider the personality of Nietzsche in any way. We only do
so in order to demonstrate a number of aspects of the last
third of the nineteenth century through the person of
Nietzsche. After all, his activities fall completely within
this period of the nineteenth century. He is the personality
who participated, I would like to say, with the greatest
sensitivity in all the cultural streams pervading Europe
during that period. He is the one who sensed the forces of
decline inherent in these trends in the most terrifying
manner and who, in the end, broke down under this tragedy,
under these horrors.

Naturally,
one can approach the picture we have in mind from any number
of directions. We shall focus on a few of them today.
Friedrich Nietzsche grew up in a parsonage in central
Germany. This implies that he was surrounded all through his
childhood by what can be designated as the modern
confinements of culture, the narrowness of civilization. He
had around him all that expresses itself in a philistine,
sentimental manner and yet simultaneously exhibited smugness,
conceit, and trivial contentment. I say complacent,
conceited, for this culture believed it had a grasp on the
untold number of secrets of the universe in threadbare,
superficial sentiments. I say content with trivialities
because these sentiments are indeed the most commonplace.
They penetrate philistine sentimentality from the very
simplest human level and, at the same time, are valued by
this philistine sentimentality as if they were the
pronouncements God uttered in the human mind.

Nietzsche was
a product of this narrowness of culture, and as a young man
he absorbed everything someone can acquire who passes through
the present-day higher forms of education as a, let me say,
unworldly youth. Already during his early teens, Nietzsche
was attracted with all his heart to everything that streams
out of Greek tragedies such as those by Sophocles or
Aeschylus.
[Note 4]
He imbued himself
with all that strives out of Greek humanism towards a certain
spiritual-physical world experience. And with all of his
human nature, with his thinking, feeling, and willing,
Nietzsche wanted to stand within this experience of world
totality of which Man can feel himself to be a part, an
individual member.

Time and
again, the soul of young Friedrich Nietzsche must have
confronted the mighty contrast existing between what the
majority of modern humanity in its philistine sentimentality
and narrow, trivial self-contentment calls reality and the
striving for loftiness inherent in the tragic poets and
philosophers of early Greek antiquity. Certainly, his soul
swung back and forth between this philistine reality and the
striving for sublimity in the Greek spirit that surpasses all
trivial human striving. And when he subsequently entered the
sphere of modern erudition, the lack of spirit and art, the
mere intellectual activity of this modern scholarship was
particularly irritating to him. His beloved Greeks, through
whom he had most intensely experienced the striving for
loftiness, had for him been remolded by modern science into
philological, formal trivialities. He had to find his way out
of the latter. Hence he acquired his thorough antipathy
against that spirit he considered the source of modern
intellectualism. He was seized with profound antipathy
against Socrates
[Note 5]
and all Socratic aspirations.

Certainly,
there are the impressive, positive sides of Socrates; there
is all that one can learn in a thorough manner through
Socrates. Yet, on the one hand, we have Socrates as he once
existed within the world of Greece and, on the other hand,
there is Socrates, the ghostly specter haunting the
descriptions of modern high school teachers and university
philosophers. With whom could young Nietzsche become
acquainted when he initially observed his surroundings? Only
with the ghostly specter Socrates! This is how he acquired
his dislike against this Socrates, out of what has arisen
through this Socratism within European civilization. Thus, he
saw in Socrates the slayer of human wholeness that in the art
and philosophy of the pre-Socratic age had streamed through
European civilization. In the end, it seemed to him that what
overlooks the world from the foundation of existence is a
reality turned philistine and desolate. He felt that any
lofty, noble striving to ascend to the spiritual spheres of
life must struggle to overcome such a reality.

Nietzsche was
unable to discover such noble tendencies in anything that
could have emerged from the prevailing striving for
knowledge; he could find it only in what originated from
efforts of artistic character. For him, what had developed as
tragic art out of ancient Greece illuminated the philistine
atmosphere into which Socratism had finally turned. He saw
Greek tragedy reborn, as it were, in what Richard Wagner was
endeavoring to create as tragedy out of the spirit of music
towards the end of the 1870's and beginning of the 1880's.
[Note 6]
In the musical drama
to be created he saw something that by ignoring Socratism was
connected directly with the first Greek age of total
humanism. Thus, he recognized two streams of art, on one
hand, the Dionysian, orgiastic one that, arising from
unfathomable depths, attempts to draw the whole human being
into the world, and, on the other hand, the one that
eventually was so perverted in Europe that it lost all its
luster and decayed into the absolute spiritual sclerosis of
modern scholarship, namely, the Apollonian stream. Nietzsche
strove for a new Dionysian art. This pervades his first work,
The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music
(Die Geburt der Tragoedie aus dem Geist der Musik).
Right away, he had to experience how the typical philistine
railed at what expressed itself in this book out of a
knowledge borne aloft by wings of imagination. Immediately,
the leading philistine of modern civilization, Wilamowitz
[Note 7],
mobilized.
(Subsequently he became the luminary of the University of
Berlin and clothed the Greek creators of tragedy in modern,
trivial garments that won the undying admiration of all those
who penetrate as deeply into the Greek word as they are
distant from the Greek spirit.) Right away the collision
occurred between the stream that, borne by the spirit, tried
to penetrate the artistic element based on knowledge and the
other that does not feel comfortable within this richly
imaginative spirit of knowledge, this knowledge borne by the
spirit, and that therefore escapes into philistine
pedantry.

Everything
his soul could experience through this contrast was then
poured out by Nietzsche in the beginning of the 1870's in his
four so-called
Thoughts Out of Season
[Note 8]
(Unzeitgemaesse Betrachtungen).
The first of these contemplations was
dedicated to the educated philistine proper of the modern
age. These
Thoughts Out of Season
have to be
considered in the right light. They were certainly not
intended as attacks against individual persons. In the first
contemplation, for example, the otherwise quite worthy and
upright David Strauss
[Note 9]
was not meant to be attacked personally. He was to be considered
as the typical representative of modern philistinism in
education which is so infinitely content with the
trivialities developing out of this modern life. We actually
experience this again and again, because, basically, matters
have not improved since those days, they have only
intensified.

This is
approximately the same experience as the one we have when we
attempt to contribute something to the comprehension of the
world out of the depths of spiritual science. Then people
come and say that although what is being said concerning an
etheric and astral body and spiritual development may all be
true, it cannot be proven. One can only prove that two times
two is four. Above all else, one has to consider how this
unprovable spiritual science relates to the certain truth
that two times two is four. You can hear today in all
possible variations — although perhaps put not quite so
bluntly — that the objection that two times two is four
must be raised against every utterance concerning soul and
spirit land. As if anybody would doubt that two times two is
four!

Friedrich
Nietzsche wished to strike out against the philistinism of
modern education when he described its prototype, David
Friedrich Strauss, the author of
Old and New Faith
(Alter and neuer Glaube),
this arch-philistine book.
He also tried to demonstrate how desolate things stood with
modern spirituality. We need only recall some important facts
to show just how desolate they are. We need only remember
that in the first half of the nineteenth century there still
existed fiery spirits, for example, the historian Rotteck,
[Note 10]
who lectured on
history in a one-sidedly liberal form but with a certain
fiery spirituality. We only have to recall that in Rotteck's
History
(Geischichte)
something of the
totality of man holds sway, albeit a somewhat withered one,
something of the human being who at least brings into the
whole experience of mankind's development as much
spirituality as there is rationality in it. We need only
compare this with the people who said later, It will lead
nowhere to try and develop a national constitution or social
conditions out of human reason. Instead, we ought to study
ancient times, concentrate on history. We should study the
way everything developed and accordingly arrange matters in
the present.

This is the
attitude that, in the end, bore its dull fruits in the
teachings of political economy represented, for instance, in
somebody like Lujo Brentano,
[Note 11]
the attitude that only wished to observe history, and
actually held that anything productive could only have been
brought into humanity's evolution in ancient times.

It held that
nowadays one would really have to empty out the human being
and then, like a sack, stuff him full with what can still be
gained from history so that modern man, aside from his skin
— and at most a little of what lies under the skin
— would, underneath this tiny area, be stuffed full
with what former ages have produced, and would in turn be
able to utter ancient Greek insights, old Germanic knowledge,
and so on. One did not think nor wished to believe that the
modern human soul could be imbued with any productivity.
History became the catchword of the day. Nietzsche in the
1870's was disgusted by this and wrote his book
The Use and Abuse of History in Life
(Vom Nutzen and Nachteil der Historie fuer das Leben)
in which he indicated how modern man is being suffocated by history.
And he demanded that productivity be attained once again.

The artistic
spirit still lived in Nietzsche. After he had turned to
Wagner, “a philosopher, as it were,”
[Note 12]
he again dealt with another philosopher, namely Schopenhauer.
[Note 13]
In Schopenhauer's ideas he saw
something of the reality of the otherwise dull and dusty
spirit of philosophy. Nietzsche regarded Schopenhauer as an
educator of modern humanity, not only as someone who had been
but as someone who ought to become such a teacher. And he
wrote his book
Schopenhauer as Educator
(Schopenhauer als Erzieher).
He followed this with
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, pointing out in an
almost orgiastic manner how a revival of modern civilization
through art would have to come about.

Strange
indeed are the depths from which
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth
originated. Friedrich Nietzsche himself had
painstakingly edited out everything he had written in
addition to what was then published under the title,
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.
One could almost say
that for each page of this book, printed in 1876, there
exists a second page that contains something completely
different. While Bayreuth and its activities are
enthusiastically celebrated in this book, in addition to each
page Nietzsche wrote another, as it were, different page
filled with deeply tragic sentiments concerning the forces of
decline in modern civilization. Indeed, even he could not
believe in what he was writing; he could not believe that the
power to truly transform the forces of decline into those of
ascent lay in Bayreuth. This tragedy prevails especially in
those pages, deleted at that time, that remained in
manuscript form and were made public only after Friedrich
Nietzsche had fallen ill. It was at that time that the great
change came over him, actually already in 1876. This period
of Nietzsche's life ended tragically in the agony over the
forces of decline inherent in modern culture.

Already in
1876 the disgust concerning the decline was stronger in his
mind than the joy over the positive forces he had initially
noted in Bayreuth. Above all, his soul was inundated by the
observation of all that has pervaded modern civilization of
untrue elements, of the present-day lack of truthfulness. And
I would like to say this concentrated itself in his mind into
a picture of what affects this modern civilization on the
human level. He was actually no longer able to discover in
this modern culture any redeeming spirituality that could
surmount the philistine view of reality. Thus, he entered his
second period in which he opposed the distorted self-concept
of human beings in modern times with what he called the
“all-too-human”
(Allzumenschliche),
with the true concept of the human being, of which people these
days do not want to know anything.

One would
like to say, Just look at those individuals who have
celebrated modern history in this manner, such as Savigny
[Note 14],
Lujo Brentano, Ranke
[Note 15]
and the other
historians and ask what they are actually doing? What is
woven into the tapestry of the active spirit of the times?
Something is being produced that is supposed to be true. Why
is it presented as truth? Because those individuals who speak
of such a truth are in reality themselves spiritually
impotent. They deny the spirit because they themselves do not
possess it and cannot discover it. They dictate to the world:
You must be thus and thus — for they lack the light
they are supposed to shed over the world. The all-too-human,
the whole all-too-narrow attitude is what is built up to the
human element and presented as absolute truth to mankind.
From 1876 on, this dwelled as a feeling in Nietzsche while he
wrote his two volumes
Human, All Too Human
(Menschliches, Allzumenschliches);
then Dawn Morgenroete, and finally,
Joyful Science
(Froehliche Wissenschaft),
by means of which Nietzsche plunged as if intoxicated into nature
so as to escape from what had actually surrounded him.

Nevertheless,
a tragic feeling was present in him. Northern Germany,
northern Europe in general and central Europe had had an
effect on him; he absorbed all that and from Schopenhauer and
Richard Wagner in particular he found his way to Voltairism;
the text
Menschliches, Allzumenschliches
was dedicated to Voltaire.
[Note 16]
He attempted to revive Socratism by trying to breathe new life
into it, but he did this by seeking the all-too-human truth,
human narrowness, behind the lie of modern civilization. He
tried to reach the spirit out of this human narrowness. He
did not find it behind the accomplishments of men of more
recent times. He believed he could find it through a kind of
intoxicated plunge into nature. He endeavored to experience
this intoxicated plunge into nature in his life by traveling
south repeatedly during his vacations in order to forget, in
the warm sun and under the blue sky, what men have produced
in the modern age. This drunken plunge into nature underlies
his
Morgenroete
and the
Froehliche Wissenschaft
as the basic feeling. He did not find joy
through it; his sense of tragedy remained. It is especially
pronounced when we see him express his sentiment in poetry
and hear:
[Note 17]

(The ravens shriek
and fly with flutt'ring wings to town;
soon it will snow, —
how fortunate is he
who now still has — a home!

Nietzsche,
too, had no home. “Fly, bird! Rasp your song in sounds
of wasteland birds.” He had no home because this is the
impression he had of himself, as if ravens were shrieking
round him when he fled again and again from Germany to Italy.
Soon, however, it became evident that he could not remain in
this mood. There are verses by Nietzsche in which he
remonstrates against anybody who takes this mood expressed in
the lines, “The ravens shriek and fly with flutt'ring
wings to town,” too seriously. He did not wish to be
considered only as a tragic person; he also wanted to laugh
about everything that had occurred in modern culture. As I
said, just read the few lines that follow after the above
poem in the most recent Nietzsche edition. So in the last
third of the nineteenth century we have, in a sense, in
Nietzsche a spirit predestined to abandon everything people
in the modern age have produced, to flee everything the arts
and the sciences have accomplished, in order to find
something original, to discover new gods and smash the
old

We might say
that this individual was too deeply wounded by his age for
these wounds to heal, much less for them to give rise to a
productive new impulse. Thus, from these wounds sprang forth
creations and ideas devoid of content. The
Superman
appeared, pervaded by sensuous, bleeding lyricism. In the
last third of the nineteenth century, it was no longer
possible for Nietzsche to penetrate to the true human being
on the basis of natural science, which had extinguished man,
or on the basis of sociology or the social structures of the
last century, an age that possessed machines but no longer
the human being, except as he stands in front of the machine.
Nietzsche did, however, experience the urge to escape through
negation, to flee what was no longer known and felt to be
human. Instead of a comprehension of the human being out of
the whole cosmos, instead of an “occult science,”
there emerged the abstract, lyrical, sultry and overheated,
pathological and convulsive
Superman,
appearing in visions before his soul in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(Also sprach Zarathustra;
[Note 18]
visions that in part touch the
deepest aspects of human nature but that basically always
sound disharmonious in some way, expressing intentional
disharmony.

Then, there
is the other negation, or rather idea devoid of content. This
life between birth and death cannot be understood if it is
not at the same time seen as extending beyond the one earth
life. Those who truly possess a feeling for grasping the one
life between birth and death, who take hold of it with such a
profound feeling and lyricism as did Friedrich Nietzsche,
those sense in the end: This life cannot be comprehended as a
single one, it must be viewed in its development through many
lives. But as little as Nietzsche could bestow a content on
the human being and therefore proceeded in a convulsive
manner to his negation, the
Superman,
as little
could he give substance to the idea of repeated earth lives.
He hollowed these lives out; they turned into the desolate,
eternal return of the same. Just think for a moment what can
arise in our mind concerning repeated earth lives, which are
linked to each other in karma through a mighty progression of
destiny. Just picture how one life pours content into the
following one; then imagine these earth lives as shadowy,
empty husks, emptied of all content, and there you have the
eternal return of the same, the caricature of the repeated
earth lives.

Impossible to
penetrate to the image of the Mystery of Golgotha by means of
what the modern confessions represent — this is how
what could have disclosed itself to him through Christianity
appeared to Nietzsche! It was impossible to penetrate the
religious conceptions that had come about since the fourth
century and to arrive at an idea of what had occurred in
Palestine at the beginning of the Christian era. Yet,
Nietzsche was filled with a profound desire for truth. The
all-too-human had come before his soul in a saddening form.
He did not wish to participate in the lie of modern
civilization; he was not fooled by an image of the Mystery of
Golgotha such as the one presented with absolute mendacity to
the world by the opponents of Christianity, by the likes of
Adolf Harnack.
[Note 19]
Even in the
lie, present as actual reality, Nietzsche still tried to
discern the truth. This was the reason for his distortion of
the Mystery of Golgotha in his
Antichrist.
[Note 20]
In the
Antichrist,
he depicted the image one has to present on the basis of the
modern religious conceptions if, instead of lying, one wishes
to speak the truth based on this form of thinking and yet, at
the same time, is unable to penetrate what modern knowledge
offers and to come to what in truth is present in the Mystery
of Golgotha.

This is
approximately Nietzsche's state of mind in the years 1886 and
1887. He had abandoned everything offered by modern cultural
insights. He had passed on to the negation of man in the
Superman,
because he could not attain to the idea of
man in modern knowledge, which has eradicated the human being
from its field. From his feeling concerning the one earth
life he had received an inkling of repeated earth lives, but
modern thinking could not give him any content for them.
Thus, he emptied out what he sensed; he no longer had any
content; only the formal continuation of the eternally same,
of the eternal repetition, stood before his soul. And in his
mind, he beheld the travesty of the Mystery of Golgotha, as
he described it in his
Antichrist,
for if he wished
to cling to the truth, he could find no way leading from what
modern theology offers to a conception of the Mystery of
Golgotha

He had been
able to study quite a bit concerning the Christian nature of
modern theology in the writings of Overbeck,
[Note 21]
the theologian from Basle. The fact
that this modern theology is not Christian is in the main
proven in Overbeck's texts dealing with modern theology. All
the unchristian elements pervading modern Christianity had
lived deeply in Nietzsche's soul. The hopeless lack of vision
in this modern knowledge had deprived him of a true overview
of what is produced in the human being in one life for the
next one. Thus arose in him the empty idea of the return of
sameness. The Christian impulse had been taken from him by
what calls itself the Christian spirit in the modern age, and
he saw the untruthfulness of his age, and he could not even
believe any longer in the truthfulness of art in which he had
tried to believe at the beginning of his ascending career. He
was already filled with this tragic mood when utterances
burst forth from his soul, such as “And the poets lie
too much ...”
[Note 22]
Out of their innermost human nature, poets and artists of the
modern culture have indeed lied too much and lie too much to
this day. For what the forces of the future need most and what
modern civilization possesses least of all is the spirit of
truth.

Nietzsche
strove for this spirit of truth; which alone can present to
the human being the true idea of himself. Through the
development in repeated earth lives, it alone can bestow on
this one earth life a meaning other than that of the
senseless return of the same. Through a sense for truth, he
thirsted for the true conception of the One Who tread the
earth in Palestine. He found only a travesty of it in modern
theology and present-day Christian demeanor. All this broke
him. Therefore, the personality of Friedrich Nietzsche
expresses the breakdown of the spirit striving for truth amid
the falsehood that has arisen since the point of crisis in
modern times, namely, since the middle of the nineteenth
century. The rise of this untruthfulness is so powerful that
people do not even have an idea of how deeply they are
enmeshed in its nets. They do not even give a thought any
more to how truthfulness should replace falsehood at every
moment.

In no other
way, however, than by realizing that our soul has to be
imbued with this fundamental feeling that truth instead of
falsehood must prevail, only through this profound feeling
can anthroposophical spiritual science live. Modern
civilization has been educated in the spirit of untruth, and
it is against this spirit of falsehood — this can
really be cited as an example — that anthroposophic
spiritual science has to fight the most. And today, matters
have reached the point, as I mentioned already at the
conclusion of my last lecture,
[Note 23]
where even in regard to our
anthroposophically oriented spiritual science we find
ourselves in a deep, intense crisis. What we need to do very
much is to work, to be intensely active out of enthusiasm for
truth. For the malaise our culture suffers from is
exemplified in what is happening hourly and daily, the
malaise that will cause its downfall if humanity does not
take heart.

In the last
issue of a weekly magazine,
[Note 24]
which usually expresses widely prevailing public opinion, we
read of agitation against Simons' political policies. It goes
without saying that neither anthroposophic spiritual science
nor the threefold social order have anything to do with
Simons' politics. Anthroposophic spiritual science, however,
is thrown together today with Simons' politics by a
far-reaching spirit of falsehood. People know what is
achieved by such means, and much will be achieved. Something
of the whole rotten mendacity comes to expression when one
reads a sentence that with quotation marks, appears in this
magazine and is supposed to characterize Simons: “He is
the favorite disciple of the theosophist Steiner, who has
prophesied a great future for him. He stands firmly on the
gospel of the threefold social order, but in the spirit of
his home town of Wuppertal he is also a devout
Christian.”

Well, there
are as many lies here as there are words! I did not say there
were as many lies as there were sentences, I said on purpose,
There are as many words as there are brazen lies — with
the exception of the last sentence — but the first
sentences are lies word for word.

By adding
this last sentence to the preceding ones, absolute paralysis
is added to mendacity. Just imagine the creature that would
come into being if somebody would become my favorite pupil,
if I would predict a great future for him, if he would firmly
cling to the “gospel of the threefold social
order” and, on top of that, if he would be a pious
Christian in the sense of the good citizens of Wuppertal!
Imagine such a person! This, however, is present-day
civilization. As insignificant as it may appear, it is a
clear symptom of modern civilization. For those who
frequently attack such things, attack with the same lies and
the same paralysis. And the others are not even aware of the
strange figures that are “conjured up before their
stupid eyes”
[Note 25]
— forgive me but I am merely quoting something that is said
by the gnomes in one of my mystery plays. They do not notice at
all what is conjured up before their, let us say,
“intelligent” eyes — intelligence in the
sense of modern civilization. People actually swallow
anything today, because the feeling for truth and veracity is
lacking, and the enthusiasm is missing from the assertion of
truth and truthfulness in the midst of an untruthful, lying
culture.

Things cannot
progress as long as these matters are not taken seriously. A
different picture must be placed before the soul today. These
days, it becomes quite clear that Europe is intent on digging
the grave of its own civilization, that it wishes to call on
something outside of Europe so that, above the closed grave
of the old civilization as well as above the already closed
grave of Goetheanism, something completely different can
arise. We shall see whether anything can still come out of
that culture for which the politicians are now digging the
grave. We shall see whether something can emerge from it that
will truly receive the forces of progress; that will discover
the human being, find the only true impulse of the idea of
eternity in repeated earth lives, and discover the true
Mystery of Golgotha and Christianity as the right impulse in
the face of all that appears in this area as untruth and
falsehood.